A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Saturday, April 22, 2006

UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE INDEPENDENT

The Independent have been running various letters & generally giving heavy coverage to the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl. Coverage has been slanted strongly towards the entirely imaginary 93,000 deaths predicted real soon now by Greenpeace as opposed to the under 50 real ones.

I had elsewhere suggested that the Indie were disinclined to publish letters which don't push the Luddite line. So I wrote this more in the expectation of proving my point than getting published & the Indie didn't fail to live down to my expectations.

From experience I have found that letters radiation hormesis are as difficult to get published as those suggesting the Milosevic "trial" was not impartial. There is a journalistic principle that at least one letter opposing that of the majority of letters chosen should be allowed,--------------------------------------Dear Editor, "A little radiation every day is just what the doctor ordered" (letter 13th April). Perhaps so. The case of the Taiwanese apartment block whose concrete was mixed with radioactive Cobalt 60 some 25 years ago is well understood within scientific circles but never reported in the popular media. What happened is that for 20 years 20,000 people were subjected to known doses of up to 75mSv (5 times the official safe limit) which resulted in a measured 97% reduction in cancer. This process is known as hormesis & is a well known phenomenon completely disproving the "no lower limit" to radiation damage for which, in any case, there has never been any actual evidence.

The media give considerable coverage to the Green's ridiculous claim that deaths from Chernobyl are 30-60,000 (the true figure is under 50). On the other hand they now give zero coverage to Greenpeace's claim, 20 years ago, that it will produce 2-4,000 deaths in Sweden alone. no such epidemic has happened, but since Greenpeace have never apologised for it we must accept it as representing the highest level of honesty of which that organisation is capable. To be fair to Greenpeace this lie does not come close to matching that of the nuclear opponent who claimed Chernobyl would kill half amillion.

It is unfortunate that, in pursuit of the scare stories that make headlines the media choose to give maximum coverage to organisations such as Greenpeace & the Green movement whos predictions have, time after time after time, been proven to be untrue. They give zero coverage to the repeated disproof of such things (for example see how much coverage the Independent didn't give to the disproof of the hockeystick theory that global warming was rising fast).

Monday, April 17, 2006

Professor Sir David King's claim that global warming may lead to a catastrophic three-degree increase, was described by the BBC as his "strongest ever warning". However, he announced two years ago that global warming was so catastrophic that it was going to make Antarctica "the only habitable continent" by 2100. Presumably that warning, like so many "environmentalist" warnings, is retroactively non-existent.

I did email Radio Scotland when they reported this "strongest ever" claim but they never retracted it (as previously reported here). Is it not strange that while we get headlines daily saying "worse than thought" the media never issue headlines saying "Global Warming/Avian Flu/Passive Smoking/Salt etc may not be as bad as previously reported".

No, I guess it isn't.

I also did letters to the Herald disagreeing with a letter which said Miloseveic was comparable to Pinochet or Blair & to the Independent in response to a letter holding up the anniverasry of Chernobyl as proof of how dangerous nuclear is, but neither have yet been published.